Effect of inter-camera angles on the performance of an H.264/AVC based multi-view video codec

This paper investigates the effect of inter-camera angles on the performance of an H.264/AVC based multi-view video codec. To achieve this, the H.264/AVC software has been modified to support multi-view video coding using its multi-frame reference property. Results were generated using a wide baseline convergent multi-view video data set: Breakdancers. To generate a set of three synchronized multi-view videos from the same scene with different inter-camera angles, all possible three camera combinations are generated and classified according to their inter-camera angles. The resulting set of multi-view videos are coded using H.264/AVC based multi-view and simulcast video codecs at different bitrates. Results demonstrate that the multi-view video codec gives superior coding performance up to 1.2dB compared to that of simulcast coding scheme at low inter-camera angles and it deteriorates as the inter camera angles increase. Finally, a range of inter-camera angles for best use of either multi-view or simulcast coding is determined.